“That, my unexpected sister,” Vanni said, appearing suddenly to hook his arm through mine, “that is Elettra.” My stare must have been blank, because he rushed to provide details. “The soprano who gave such fine concerts in Amalia? I thought your sister would want to see her sing.”
Vanni had remembered that Mirella craved the sounds of opera more than the taste of any delicacy or the touch of the finest silk. Another sign that he cared for Mirella better than Ambrogio Otto had ever been capable of doing.
Cielo’s hand nipped at my shoulder, and she drew me close to whisper, “In case your sense of magic is overwhelmed by the scent of every fish from Lake Dietà, all of which seem to have been fried for this happy occasion, the singer is a strega.”
“So we have Mimì, a cousin I barely know, and a rising star of the Vinalian opera. That won’t be enough. We need someone powerful. A key member of the Moschella line, maybe?”
“You act as if the others aren’t important,” Cielo said tightly. It was easy to trace the strega’s bitterness back to the source. Until Cielo had found out that her father was the Capo’s brother, Cielo had been one of those unimportant streghe. She had lived most of her life that way—in fact, she had preferred it.
“I have to think of things from Father’s perspective,” I said.
“Well, please inform me when Niccolò has left and I have Teo back again,” Cielo said. She turned, casting her eyes over a large number of men with light olive skin, softly molded features, and curly red hair.
“Which of you is the most powerful?” she asked, a little too loudly.
I cuffed her arm with my hand, and she spun back to me, the motion blurry with wine and feeling.
“Are you looking for someone to dance with?” Vanni asked, bounding into our tense moment. “I’d be happy to find you my second cousin Nino, who will dip the courtliest bow you’ve ever seen or throw you over his shoulder, according to your likes.”
Vanni started, realizing all at once who he was talking to—the servant I had kept at my side in the Capo’s court. “The last time we met, you were less . . .” Vanni’s hands sketched a healthy set of curves in the air. “Well, I’m glad to see you again, no matter what the shape. This is a regular reunion!” Only Vanni Moschella would think to celebrate our week in Amalia as the best of old times. He tipped his glass. “To your health.”
“To your wife,” Cielo said.
“To Mirella!” Vanni shouted with iron lungs, and the room roared its agreement.
“To the di Sangro women!” Cielo cried, lofting her glass high. “And their particular strain of magic.”
The room stopped, everyone paused in the midst of a sip or a word. Even the bows of the violinists paused over their strings.
“Yes,” Father said, picking up the toast across the room. “To the di Sangro women, may they all make matches to those who are worthy.”
Apparently, my feelings for Cielo hadn’t escaped Father’s notice, even with Cielo in girlish form.
Fiorenza stepped right in front of Father, stretched her arm to its fullest length, and shouted, “Now drink!”
I took a long sip and coughed. This northern wine had a bite. I muscled it down, hoping to soften the edges of my embarrassment. As I settled my cup on a nearby table, Fiorenza sent me a look that was half apology, half warning that Father’s mood was not bound to improve. Father nodded at the musicians, and at the cue of the wise Niccolò di Sangro they began to play an extravagant waltz. Elettra slid into place at the head of the orchestra, and as the music swelled and the cheers of the crowd thickened, the soprano’s voice rose above the fray. Her hands moved languidly through the air as her mouth shaped pure, trembling vowels that rippled with vibrato. Each note was clear yet tinted with emotion, like the vibrantly steeped colors of stained glass. I felt, at once, the happiest I’d been in years.
Was Elettra’s magic tied to her music?
I grabbed Cielo’s arm and pulled her into the dance, coupled with her as the men and women around us whirled in tight pairs.
“What are you doing, Teo?” Cielo asked, a knot of confusion between her dark eyebrows.
“I promised not to use magic,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean I have to lie about who I am.”
Cielo looked fearful and proud. Her steps were a clumsy guess at a dance she had probably never done, so I kept my hands on her waist, taking the man’s part as I had at the ball in Amalia. As Cielo and I worked our way across the room in the twisting boxes of a complicated waltz, we passed Father and Fiorenza at the edge of the great hall.
“Who is that stranger cavorting with our daughter?” Father asked.
“Oh, she’s yours again?” Cielo bit out.
Father didn’t catch Cielo’s wine-scented mumble, or if he did, he chose to ignore it. I waited for magic to burst out of me or for Cielo to flicker in and out of her body.
Instead, the music broke.
People clapped uncertainly. It hadn’t sounded like the end of a song. Elettra’s voice held a low, quavering note, and worry scratched at my heart. I grabbed another glass of wine, wishing that I could use magic to change it into a knife. I kept my promise to Mirella, breaking the glass and leaving myself with the lesser weapon of a shattered stem. I waited for Beniamo to storm through the doors, Ambrogio to march in and demand my sister. At first, I did not understand that the room was being overtaken by figures in dark leather.
And then I understood too well.
I had no talent for searching out streghe, but their magic weighted the air. It was like smelling death on the wind, salted and rotten, forcing its way into my senses.
“Soldiers of Erras,” Cielo whispered.
These were the streghe who believed that leaving magic unused was a sin against the old gods. I had seen a soldier of Erras in the flesh only once before, the night when Father had killed a man on the stairs, and his magic had passed to me.
“Father,” I murmured, running toward him, around the confused and newly terrified guests. He was in great danger if these streghe had come for him, hoping to reclaim the magic that he left untouched.
I shouldered past clusters of people, their sweat from dancing taking on the sharp tang of fear. The great doors were closed by the soldiers of Erras, and my heart banged out an echo. Father was only a few steps away. He stared at me as if we’d reached the last note of our song.
“No,” I said. “No.”
Hands fastened around me, an unseen person pulling me backward by the waist. I dragged my heels and rioted in this soldier’s arms, but I could not change my course. They would grab Father while I was pinned and powerless.
A blade caressed my neck. It did not cut—it did worse than that. It whispered what it wanted.
My life. My magic.
I slid my eyes all over the room and found Cielo held down by two men, knives pointed at her leather book and her heart.
I’d gotten it wrong.
The soldiers of Erras didn’t care about Niccolò di Sangro tonight.
They wanted us.
The stranger held the knife at my back, driving me to the center of the room.
Destroy them, my magic said.
The soldiers of Erras had brought magic to Mirella’s wedding in order to capture me. I would die sooner than let them hurt anyone.
Their presence carved a circle from the crowd. My family, the Moschella family, and all of their guests drew back. Everyone seemed to know the steps of this dance, without having to be told.
I counted at least three figures clad in leather. One of them pointed a scarred pistol at the crowd. Another ransacked the table of desserts, which I had considered doing only a few minutes earlier. He broke apart the olive oil cakes and stuffed figs and cheese into his mouth, eating with the fury of a man who has left the rules of society far behind.
These were not the well-fed noble
s I had feared in the Capo’s court. They were lean and hard and hungry. At least three of them to change, I told my magic. There were probably more if I turned my head, but the knife returned to its original place at my neck, stealing that possibility.
I would have to abandon my promise to Mirella and use magic. It came with risks. If I wasn’t precise, it might change everyone around me, instead of just the soldiers.
The slight woman at my side pressed the knife deeper into my throat until it found my pulse. Even through my terror, I knew that the edge felt strange, unlike any metal I was familiar with. I slid my eyes to look closer and found that it wasn’t metal at all but pure bone, carved from blunt form into a sharp threat. I wasn’t sure why this strega relied on such a knife instead of her magic. Unless all she wanted was to kill me, using the brilliant death to take my power.
Destroy them, my magic said. Now.
The throbbing at a single point in my neck overpowered any other feeling in my body.
I called on my magic, and it rose, and gathered, and then—
A steady hiss of the old language stopped it.
Your magic was born as nothing but a little girl’s trick, a way to show off for Father, and now that it has grown so much bigger, you have grown smaller. Afraid. You took stolen magic and it’s breaking you.
At first I assumed that the strega holding me captive had decided to insult me in the old language—with information a soldier of Erras couldn’t possibly know. But there was no voice stirring in the air, no breath hitting my skin. There were only the words in the old language, a steady poisonous drip.
You are powerful and useless, which is worse than being powerless.
The words seemed to be sliding along the blade’s sharp edge, cutting through my thoughts, straight to my magic.
Change these people, I demanded.
My magic rustled, shivered, stayed silent.
We need to save Cielo, I implored. And Father. Everyone we care about in the world, not to mention ourselves.
But this bone knife had a way to keep my magic from rising up. It held some kind of counter-magic strong enough to subdue the power of many streghe crammed into my body. I thought of the gold ring the Capo wore, the one that could turn magic back into useless wishes. This was different, though. It did not negate the power I sent out into the world. It reached inside of me and stopped me from using it in the first place.
Across the room, Cielo struggled against another white knife. It must have possessed the same strange power. Cielo flickered once—girlish form, boyish form—but as I waited for those changes to gust into a whirlwind, my strega grew sluggish.
And then went unnaturally still.
“Cielo!” I cried, pushing against the knife. A few drops of blood slithered down my neck and into my dress. Everyone around me gasped, drawing my attention away from Cielo and the soldiers of Erras and back to our audience.
My friends, my family.
They were about to watch us die.
“These two have crossed the Capo,” the woman at my side called out, her voice as leathery as her clothes, both hard and supple. “We have carved out a deal with this new leader of Vinalia, so to cross him is to cross us.”
“And who are you, exactly?” Vanni’s mother, the matriarch of the Moschella family, cried out.
“You may call me Dantae,” the woman said, the deep stitch of a dimple appearing in her cheek. Her expression would have been a smirk if there’d been any humor in it. “These two,” she said, “carry magic stolen from the Capo. He would like it returned.”
I almost snorted, but I could see Cielo mocking me already. You forced your throat into the blade with a snort? What a very di Sangro way to die.
I settled for a hard roll of the eyes. “That magic was stolen to start with,” I said, forcing myself to speak so the room would know—so the world would have the truth. “The Capo tricked dozens of streghe, killed them, and gathered their power.”
I hadn’t agreed to the Capo’s foul deeds, but now their legacy lived in my blood. Unless I used this magic to change things—truly change them—I would never forgive myself. The world would stay broken, split along the same old lines. But the bone knife had whispered words that stuck in my softest spots. I was afraid.
To cause more suffering. To lose more than I already had.
My magic wasn’t the only thing that had grown beyond measure. So had the possibilities for pain.
“Regardless of how that magic was made, the Capo owns it,” Dantae said calmly.
“Is that what it means to own something now?” I asked. “To ruin lives and claim the rewards?”
Dantae shrugged. She clearly did not care about the Capo or his interests—which meant she cared about whatever he was offering her.
“This one . . .” She used the whispering point of the bone knife to flick back the hair around my ear, and then leaned in close. I could feel the presence of her magic beneath the blade’s, like a subtle flavor hiding inside of a bolder one. “The Capo wants to see you punished for crimes against the Vinalian empire.”
Empire.
There was the Capo’s plan laid bare. He would stir Eterra—the world’s most infamous empire—to war. It was the quickest way to prove that he could create an empire of his own. He would sacrifice streghe and their magic. He did not care how many died to bring a Vinalian empire to life.
This was the kind of gutting, greedy magic that some claimed streghe brought to Vinalia. The Capo was not a strega, though. He was simply a man who believed his dream was important enough to pay for in blood and pain and loss.
Dantae turned to face the wedding guests, spinning a circle with her arms outstretched. She was smaller than me in every way, but she had no trouble filling space with her confidence. I wondered if she had been some kind of stage performer before she donned the righteous mantle of the soldiers of Erras. “Do any of you disagree that these two have wronged the leader of Vinalia?”
Fiorenza took a step forward.
My pride and panic twisted into a single wick, burning fast.
They were going to kill her. Dantae took the knife away from my throat, and I felt the point of another at my back, one of her compatriots quick to take her place.
But the knife behind me felt different, duller.
Dantae leveled the bone knife, pointing it at Fiorenza. “Mothers are so predictable,” she said with a sigh worthy of the great stages of Eterra.
Fiorenza’s amber eyes lit a path to me. She was the mother who had raised me, loved me without question, guided me without faltering. There had been times when I felt guilty for loving her so much, because the woman who gave birth to me had to die for Fiorenza to become part of my life. But I could not imagine it without her. Before I knew there were streghe in the world, I trusted that it held magic because of her. She was the lantern that had come into the darkness of the Uccelli, banishing the deepest shadows from my heart.
When I tried to change the knife in Dantae’s hand, to toss magic out of my body like a rope that would save Fiorenza, it fell apart, sad and frayed. The bone knife had a lasting effect—even when it wasn’t at my throat.
“You really shouldn’t have stepped forward, you know,” Dantae said. “Defiance doesn’t come for free.”
“Name your price, then,” Fiorenza said.
I held my breath as Dantae stalked forward. She pointed the knife at the low-dipping neckline of Fiorenza’s dress, where it hovered a few inches above her heart. Fiorenza pressed her lips together, but she did not flinch.
Father moved to her side, pale. Could he feel the influence of the knife? What did it whisper to him?
Dantae tapped the flat of the bone knife against Fiorenza’s skin. “I’ll take Teodora with me today, whether or not you live to see it. But as you have no magic, it would be a wasted death for my people, who need to stay strong
more than ever. Now, what would quiet a brave woman like you and keep the others in line?”
Dantae smiled and whisked the blade away from Fiorenza’s breast. “The five families are so tightly knit, are they not? I think that today the price will be one of your own.” She turned the knife on the crowd, running it along the line of guests, causing a ripple of fear.
She settled on my cousin Sofia, the one who had helped Mirella prepare for the wedding. The seamstress that Cielo said was a strega. Dantae lured the girl forward, beckoning as if the knife were a long, bony finger.
“Here,” she said, turning the handle around, offering the blade to my cousin. “Do what you know is right.”
My cousin swallowed and accepted the bone handle. Her eyes fluttered, and then a look of concentration washed over her. She was listening. Not to any person in this room—to the knife. Was it asking her to kill me, so Dantae’s hands stayed clean?
The girl twisted her grip on the handle, pointed the knife at her own stomach, and stabbed it deep.
As she slumped, my mind blazed a trail back to the memory of Cielo’s mother dead by the work of her own knife.
“No,” I shouted.
I might not have known this girl well, but she was family twice over—a di Sangro and a strega.
Dantae crouched over the girl where she’d fallen, sweeping a bit of hair away from her face as blood flowered dark on her dress. “Don’t fear this moment,” Dantae said. “It’s the way of things. It’s the way of magic.” I shuddered at the sight of the knife still in my cousin’s gut. At the touch of tenderness in Dantae’s voice.
Sofia’s wild gasping stopped.
Now that my cousin was dead, Dantae strode over her body, treating it as a simple obstacle. A log in a stream. “This girl’s life and her magic are now mine,” Dantae announced as she returned to her place at my side. She placed the knife back at my throat, keeping her voice at a hearty volume for the crowds. “Now that you know what we can do—what we can take—does anyone wish to continue our argument?”
My eyes went to the other streghe in the room. Lorenzo was gripping Mimì’s elbow, looking for a way out. Mimì had gone glassy with fear. Elettra slipped behind several of the orchestra members, only a glimpse of her shining gown still visible, like starlight through the trees.
The Storm of Life Page 5